Sayre2e ch35 integrated_lecture_pp_ts-150676

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Self-portrait as a Soldier. 1915.27-1/4" × 24”.


Map: The Western Front, 1914-18.


Map: World War I, 1914-18.


John Singer Sargent. Gassed. An oil study. 1918-19.7-1/2' × 20’.

Trench Warfare and the Literary Imagination

What were the effects of trench warfare on the European imagination?

• Wilfred Owen: “The Pity of War” — Owen’s poems drew immediate attention for his horrifying descriptions of the war’s victims. His intent is that the reader should share his horrific dreams.

• In the Trenches: Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front — The horror of trench warfare is probably nowhere more thoroughly detailed than in Remarque’s book. It sold more than a million copies in Germany the first year of its publication in 1928.

• William Butler Yeats and the Specter of Collapse — Yeats moved beyond the Symbolist movement and imagined a much darker world. The specter of life in the new postwar era is insentient, pitiless, and nightmarish.

• T.S. Eliot: The Landscape of Desolation — Eliot’s poetry reflects both the erudition of a scholar and the depression of a classicist. In the Waste Land he describes a world turned upside down, a landscape of complete emotional and physical aridity.

• Discussion Question: How did the experience of World War I affect attitudes about patriotism and heroism?

Escape From Despair: Dada in the Capitals

What is Dada?

• Dada was an international signifier of negation. It did not mean anything, just as, in face of war, life itself had come to seem meaningless. Dada came into being in Zurich, founded by a group of intellectuals and artists escaping the conflict in neutral Switzerland. Key figures in the movement are Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Raoul Hausmann.

• Discussion Question: Why do the Dadaists reject language?


Hans (Jean) Arp. Fleur Manteau (Flower Hammer). 1916.24-3/8" × 19-5/8”.


Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912.58" × 35”.


Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. Replica of 1917 original made in 1963. 1917; 1963.

Height: 14”.

Video: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain

MyArtsLabChapter 35 – The Great War and Its Impact


Marcel Duchamp. Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q). Rectified Readymade: reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa altered with pencil. 1919.


Raoul Hausmann. The Art Critic. 1919-20.12-1/2" × 10”.

Russia: Art and Revolution

How did the arts respond to the Russian Revolution?

• Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet State — Lenin headed the most radical of Russian postrevolutionary groups, the Bolsheviks. He was a utopian idealist. But when his party did not succeed in free elections, he dissolved the government and created the Politburo

• The Arts of the Revolution — Prior to the Revolution, avant-garde Russian artists established their own brand of modern art. Kasimir Malevich created Cubo-Futurism and then became engaged in Suprematism. After the revolution Malevich was inspired by El Lissitzsky and his piece, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, noting that Suprematism should adopt a more “Constructive” approach to reorganizing the world. Sergei Eisenstein was a revolutionary filmmaker who created The Battleship Potemkin. Lev Kuleshov developed a theory of montage.


Kasimir Malevich. Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension. 1915.

28" × 17-1/2”.


Kasimir Malevich. View of Malevich's works hanging in “0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting,” Petrograd, 1915. 1915.


El Lissitzsky. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. 1919.

Freud, Jung, and the Art of the Unconscious

How does Freudian psychology manifest itself in the Surrealist art movement?

• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents— In this book, Freud wrote that the greatest impediment to human happiness was aggression.

• The Jungian Archetype— Jung believed that the unconscious life of the individual was founded on the collective unconscious, the innate, inherited contents of the human mind. It manifests itself in the form of archetypes, those patterns of thought that recur throughout history and across cultures, in the form of dreams, myths, and the fairy tales.

• The Dreamwork of Surrealism — Andre Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto and credited Freud with encouraging his own creative endeavors. Max Ernst’s, The Master’s Bedroom, Its’ Worth Spending a Night There is the first Surrealist work in the visual arts. Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror addresses Surrealism’s most basic theme – the self in all its complexity. A sense of self-alienation is central to the work of Salvador Dali. Among the first paintings executed under the influence of the Surrealists is The Lugubrious Game. A piece by Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, is the work that caused the Surrealists to take serious interest in the possibilities of a Surrealist sculptural project.

• Discussion Question: What is Freud’s basic thesis in Civilization and Its Discontents?


Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.






















Max Ernst. The Master’s Bedroom, It’s Worth Spending a Night There (Letter from Katherine S. Dreyer to Max Ernst, May 25, 1920). 1920.

6-3/8" × 8-5/8”.


Joan Miró. The Birth of the World. 1925.8’ 2-3/4" × 6’ 6-3/4”.


Pablo Picasso. Girl before a Mirror. 1932.64" × 51-1/4”.


Salvador Dali. The Lugubrious Game. 1929.17-1/2" × 12”.


Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory. 1931.9-1/2" × 13”.

Closer Look: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

MyArtsLabChapter 35 – The Great War and Its Impact


Alberto Giacometti. Suspended Ball. 1930-31.24" × 14-1/2" × 14”.


Meret Oppenheim. Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure). 1931.Overall height: 2-3/8"; cup diameter: 4-3/4"; saucer diameter: 9-3/8"; spoon

length: 8”.

Experimentation and the Literary Life: The Stream-of-Consciousness Novel

What is the stream-of-consciousness style of writing?

• Joyce, Ulysses, and Sylvia Beach — No writer was more influential in introducing the stream-of-consciousness narrative than James Joyce and no novel better demonstrates its powers than his Ulysses. Banned in both Britain and the United States, Sylvia Beach agreed to publish Ulysses in an edition of 1, 000.

• Virginia Woolf: In the Mind of Mrs. Dalloway — Woolf argued that women could realize their full potential only if they achieved both financial and psychological independence from men. Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s effort to examine for herself “an ordinary day” of a decidedly different character from those in Ulysses.

• Marcel Proust and the Novel of Memory — It was Proust who first imagined the novel as a mental space. Remembrance of Things Past shows that it is the book and the acts of memory that it restores to the present—and hence to the future--that time, in all its flux is finally “regained.”


James Joyce. Sylvia Beach and James Joyce reading reviews of Ulysses. 1922.


Jacob Lawrence. Continuity & Change: Harlem and the Great Migration: The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 60: And the migrants kept coming.

1940-41.18" × 12”.

News & Politics

Sayre2e ch35 integrated_lecture_pp_ts-150676